The Jew Who Fell in Love With Wagner

By Judy Maltz for The Jewish Daily Forward

(Haaretz) — The music of German composer Richard Wagner was never played in his parents’ home: Too many bad associations with Hitler and the Nazis, explains filmmaker Hilan Warshaw.

So it wasn’t until he began playing violin in a New York City youth orchestra that Warshaw was first introduced to the work of the notoriously anti-Semitic 19th-century German opera composer. And rather embarrassingly, he found himself smitten.

“I just loved the music. But, at the same time, it was something that my conscious mind told me was anathema,” he recalls.

Over the years, Warshaw – whose family lost many relatives during the Holocaust – developed what he describes as a “push-pull relationship” with Hitler’s favorite composer. And it made him curious about the other Jews in Wagner’s life.

So curious, in fact, that he decided to devote the past several years to making a film on the subject. The fruit of that effort, “Wagner’s Jews,” is playing in Tel Aviv at the Docaviv festival, Israel’s premier event for documentary film.

Produced, directed and written by Warshaw, the feature-length film focuses on the Jews who were some of Wagner’s closest associates, among them the gifted young pianist Carl Tausig, who was almost like a son to him; the conductor Hermann Levi, who happened to be the son of a rabbi; and the pianist Joseph Rubinstein, who lived in Wagner’s home for many years and killed himself when the composer died.

The film also explores the complicated relationship of post-Holocaust Jews, both in Israel and abroad, with Wagner’s music.

Although it is not well known that Wagner had many Jewish supporters and friends, notes Warshaw, neither should it be all that surprising.

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Jewish Folk Songs for Shavuot

Shavuot [Pentecost], a festival tucked away in the middle of the year and likely to be forgotten by secular Jews if not for the abundant assortment of cheesecake and blintse recipes, is actually a rich source of folklore and folksongs reflecting agricultural festivity and the mysticism of revelation. The different names highlight various aspects of the festival.

1. The names Festival of the First Fruits [Chag habikurim] and Harvest Festival [Chag hakatsir] reflect the fact that Shavuot was originally an agricultural festival - "You shall observe the festival of the harvest, the first fruits of your labors, which you will sow in the field…" (Shemot [Exodus] 23:16). The Mishnah (Bikurim, C.2-4) gives a detailed account of the procession of people bearing their first fruits to the Temple: "The inhabitants of the district assembled in a city of the district and spent the night in the town square. Early in the morning, their leader said: 'Let us rise and go up to Zion, to the house of the Lord our God.' Those who lived near Jerusalem brought fresh figs and grapes, and those who lived far away brought dried figs and raisins. . . . The sounds of the flute announced the pilgrims’ coming until they neared Jerusalem, when they sent messengers ahead and arranged their first fruits for presentation. The children's song Saleinu al k'tefeinu [Our baskets on our shoulders] by Levin Kipnis and Yedidya Admon (1929) harks back to this ancient Biblical festival. It is this agricultural aspect of Shavuot that was highlighted in the early days of modern Israel, especially in kibbutz-inspired celebrations. Here are two sites with lyrics of the many agriculturally-based folk songs, one in Hebrew and the other with English transcriptions.

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For more Shavuot ideas, check out our    page.

From Bible heroines to Bernie Madoff: Alicia Jo Rabins strikes new chord

By Rebecca Spence for JTA

BERKELEY, Calif. (JTA) – Plucking a violin on an empty stage, an animated scene of Manhattan skyscrapers scrolling behind her pregnant body, the musician, poet and Torah scholar Alicia Jo Rabins begins to sing what sounds like a mystical incantation of sorts.

“Bring me your empty jar, I will fill it,” she intones. “Where it comes from, I can’t tell you, no one knows.”

Inspired by the biblical story of the prophet Elisha, Rabins, 37, is musing in the broadest possible terms about the crimes of Bernard Madoff, whose decades-long Ponzi scheme and the resulting fallout — particularly in the Jewish community — led to the creation of her first experimental rock opera, “A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff.”

Rabins’ one-woman show, which had its California premiere last month at the Berkeley Jewish Music Festival and will be released next week as a digital download, parses the unholy ground of Madoff’s crimes through the eyes of seven disparate characters with both direct and indirect ties to the $50 billion scam.

Over the course of two years Rabins – who with a workspace grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council was working out of an abandoned Wall Street office when news of the scandal broke – conducted interviews with a wide-ranging cast of characters, from a Jewish-Buddhist monk who offered philosophical reflections to a Wall Street risk analyst who saw the writing on the wall.

“I wanted to have a Jewish response to Bernie Madoff,” Rabins said over coffee in Portland, Ore., where she moved last year from Brooklyn, N.Y., with her husband and 2-year-old daughter, Sylvia. “I grew interested in the ancient rituals of excommunication, and so I wanted to consider whether a modern, secular excommunication might be warranted. I mean, if not Madoff, then who?”

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The Rock Star’s Guide to Eating, Praying, and Loving in the High Security State of Israel

Why Justin Bieber, Elton John, Madonna, and, yes, Alicia Keys, love to play Tel Aviv—and why Israel loves them back

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet Magazine

It was the summer of 2011, and some of Israel’s best-trained security personnel were having a rough time: The perimeter had been breached, and before they knew it, hordes of hostiles were moving quickly, closing in on the target. All seemed lost, but men trained in close-quarter combat in Gaza and Ramallah and southern Lebanon are never without contingency plans. They didn’t disappoint: Before anyone could tell what was going on, an engine roared and a white scooter appeared from somewhere just by the waterline.

It was time to get Justin Bieber away from the paparazzi.

Before the photographers and the shrieking fans could give chase, the scooter whisked away the boy wonder into traffic and toward an undisclosed location. It was an Entebbe-like operation, rich with detail, the kind that makes Israel among the best places in the world for rock stars to visit.

Think of international artists performing in the Jewish state, and a parade of controversies comes to mind, such as the time Roger Waters used his visit as a platform to talk politics, the time Macy Gray came back from her visit and Tweeted that she regretted the whole thing, or the time Elvis Costello canceled his concert to express his solidarity with the Palestinians. And Israel’s concert promoters, a very small clique, hold the same stature as the country’s top diplomats, more accustomed to discussing politics than sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

What they’ve given the country in return is simple but priceless: Bieber, Elton John, Madonna, Lady Gaga, and a host of other luminaries who’ve performed in Tel Aviv recently, leading a renaissance in celebrity visits to Israel unseen since the heady and hopeful days of the 1993 Oslo Accords. For these entertainers, accustomed to the vagaries of touring, Israel is not a sensitive topic to discuss sotto voce, but a haven, a country seemingly engineered to provide itinerant performers with their very particular needs.

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Did Richard Wagner Inspire Hitler or Did He Inspire ‘Star Wars’? And Does It Matter?

The whole question of modernity, in new assessments of the German composer and his work

By Vladislav Davidzon for Tablet Magazine

While Wagnerian fanatics undeniably include a contingent of what one critic memorably referred to as “leathery old Nazis,” these are now no longer taken seriously. After a period of intense academic/historical skirmishing in the late 1980s to mid-1990s, recent advancements in Wagner studies scholarship have settled our understanding of the genealogical sources of his ideas. His anti-Judaism belonged to the Utopian, anti-clerical family of the sort held by Marx and Bauer as well as drawing on the race theorists and social Darwinism circulating at the time: His overriding obsession with purity of German myth and language metastasized easily into a crusade for purity of race. Adorno’s once crankish position that Wagner’s work was the decisive element linking the 19th-century rebirth of German Romanticism to the development of National Socialism now approximates something akin to received wisdom. Hitler’s love for the work, epitomized by his identification with the character of the sensitive misunderstood (and eventually victorious) artist Walther von Stolzing in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers From Nuremberg) is a fait accompli matter in the opera’s patrimony and will most likely forever encrust the works with a grimy layer of infamy.

Given that Wagner’s music has clearly stood the test of time, what remains is a host of delicate and unresolved questions about the implications of the composer’s anti-Semitism and other toxic affinities: Was Wagner merely acting as a vessel for commonly accepted ideas? Are the anti-Semitic tropes interwoven into the formal properties of the music and operas themselves? If music, as Wagner’s defenders often proclaim, cannot be fascist, what about the contents of the librettos? If the librettos are indeed not anti-Semitic, does that justify the lifting of Israel’s unofficial ban on reciting his works? Writing in the New York Review of Books last summer, the conductor Daniel Barenboim, perhaps the most ardent living champion of Wagner’s rehabilitation, began his eloquent vindication of the right to play Wagner in Israel with the observation that “perhaps no other composer in history sought to combine such obviously incompatible elements in his works.”

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Reviving the Downtown Sound

John Zorn’s Tzadik record label compiles the radical work of the 1980s New York jazz group Hasidic New Wave

By Jake Marmer for Tablet Magazine

When we speak about the transmission of Yiddishkeit, one of the most fascinating cultural phenomena of the late 20th century was New York’s downtown music scene. A number of tremendously talented young Jewish musicians aligned their musical identities with traditional Jewish music, re-interpreting it a new, radical way. Hasidic New Wave, one of the experimental groups to emerge from the downtown music ferment, will go down in history for their treatment of traditional Hasidic chants—niggunim—which the band’s leaders Frank London and Greg Wall, fellow graduates of the New England Conservatory, learned when playing Hasidic weddings to support themselves. The band’s entire output, as well as a CD of new, previously unreleased material, has now been collected and is being republished by John Zorn’s Tzadik Records as a box set. On Dec. 12, the release will get a celebration from friends and special guests at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge. I had the honor of writing liner notes for the HNW boxset. When I asked Wall if he had any thoughts about the writing, he said: “Write it in a way that’s most exciting for you.” When I asked London he said: “Make it a poem.”

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1. At a tish, before getting the song rolling, you tell a story. Here’s one about how the first Hasidic tune—a niggun—came to be. A rebbe, before he was known as such, was abducted by a group of hoodlums. Whether they expected a ransom or did this simply out of spite wasn’t clear. He sat tied up, on the side, as they gathered, and drank, and burst into song—because that’s what everyone did, forlorn hoodlums too; everyone always sang. A Ukrainian song with Ukrainian words, which a rebbe, who wasn’t then a rebbe, could not understand. But he joined in, more bleating goat than songbird, blurring the lyrics, washing over them in a language that was not Slavic, and neither was it Hebrew or Yiddish. If you ever read a laundered page of poetry you’ll have a sense of what he sounded like. A desperate bid, inspired by fear rather than revelation? Either way, what followed neither he, nor the robbers could have predicted; he became the root to their tree, root-radical note underneath their melody. What prompted the turn-around, what the newly appointed rebbe and his newly appointed Hasids suddenly stumbled upon, was the sense that everything in the world has a metaphysical twin—likely a triplet. What they stumbled upon was the fact that the true the counterpoint of tradition and its interpretation is neither in collaboration nor the escape—but a single conflicted, entranced, festive, and entirely unexpected, world.

 Listen to “Vesamachta Dub”:

Sweet New Sounds from the Ancient City of Jaffa

by  Leah Falk for Jewniverse

 On Luna Abu Nassar's Bandcamp-released debut album, Asaper Lakh ("I'll tell you") your ears may deceive you. The 24-year-old Palestinian-Israeli singer's light, flexible voice hits first, and is momentarily mistakable for that of any twenty-something girl with a guitar. But then a hint of scraped harp strings, a little reverb, and the force of Abu Nassar's lyrics—effortless in both Hebrew and Arabic—makes the album decidedly more earth than sylph.

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